On 7 Mar 2001, at 15:48, Karman, Al wrote:

> The relationals are here to stay----pity they require So Much
> horsepower for even the most mundane tasks......winning that
> hard-fought war due in no small part to ever-less-expensive
> horsepower....

All civilization depends on the fact that we are a lazy creature.
(actually, all life depends on being lazy, you have get more
energy from somewhere than the effort you expend to obtain
it) Given a choice between sitting on a chair and figuring out
how to get a washing machine or getting off ones butt to do
the laundry by hand; which would you choose?  Is the
horsepower of a particular washing machine really a
determinant consideration here?

RDMS are popular with business leaders because they appear
to offer the opportunity to do more with less labour.  The
attraction is that programming and maintenance of RDBM
based applications can be made much simpler than the usual
business application based on alternative storage methods.
This is due to the amount of data awareness that can be built
into an SQL based file structure.

Simpler program construction means quicker production, and
much less maintenance over the life of the application.  If this
cuts even one full time position then that translates into long
term labour savings totalling hundreds-of-thousands of dollars
over the life of an application, if not millions.  What does 80K
for a RDBMS and 100K for a machine to run it on mean in this
case?  When one then considers that any alternative is going
to require a capital expenditure of at least half that of the
RDBMS route; the case is made.

We can quibble over the numbers and the validity of the
perceptions held by the decision makers, but fundamentally
they are right.  The fact that currently it may be much more
difficult, and expensive,  to get a particular RDBM to perform
sufficiently well to realize these savings has not get sunk in.
In any case, this problem is fixed at a single point in the
design and itself is amenable to improvements in the RDBMS
engine.

Regards,
Jim
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James B. Byrne                Harte & Lyne Limited
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fax: +1 905 561 0757          Hamilton, Ontario
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